Thursday, December 11, 2008

I was doing courses for graphic design, and doing fairly well, I suppose. I originally went into graphic design in the year 2000. While I had a talent with computers, I wanted to avoid all that cross browser crap and just make pretty printed things. Paper doesn't have cross browser issues! So I spent 6 years learning how to do that. But the thing is, there's no escaping one's natural talents and obsessions it seems.

I accidentally got really good at making web pages. I didn't really want to, it just happened. I got way better at it than my peers in the graphic design courses. I ended up with a reputation. I found one of my typography professors taking a "web design" course that I'd taken in a previous semester. While that was amusing, it didn't last long. He commissioned my services to teach him the craft, and so I did what I could.

A couple years later me and all my graphic design friends ended up in a different university together. That was weird, especially since it was full of zombies. And a couple unicorns. Seriously. Then they all decided to take a web design course at this university. I later found out that what the university meant by "web design" was "make a flash movie and hastily slap it in the middle of an html table, then maybe publish it online if you can figure that shit out".

So I got a bug up my ass about that. I couldn't help it. That sort of thing just bothers me. It really shouldn't bother me since I'm just trying to be a graphic designer and make pretty printed things. But the idea of all my friends putting these opaque unfriendly singy dancy binary blobs on the internet really stuck in my craw. And I think someone else was having trouble with web things or something and heard that I was good at it, I don't know. One thing lead to another, and I wrote the webschool awesome articles. I combined it with one-on-one tutoring. It all fell off a bit as I never got to lesson 3 (which would have included some css), but oh well. Then I imploded and moved to australia.

Skip forward a couple years and my teenage nephew is having some kind of identity crisis (happens to all of us). I offer to teach him some web things, and he thinks it's a good idea. So I dusted off WSA and posted it to my blog for his benefit. I meant to get to lesson 3 some months back, but as you can see from this blog.. I'm full of ideas, and not enough experience/wisdom/ability to get them all done and real.